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iLAND Symposium 2011: Slow Networks: Discovering the urban Environment Through Collaborations in Dance and Ecology

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Slow Networks: Discovering the Urban Environment Through Collaborations in Dance And Ecology is iLAND’s third annual symposium on dance, movement, and the environment. The two-day event in the heart of New York City brings together dancers, choreographers, designers, ecologists, advocates, and scientists for interactive panel discussions, field workshops, and networking opportunities. This year’s symposium features an in-depth conversation with recipients of last year’s iLAB residencies, kicking off another dynamic year of iLAND programming.

March 25, 2011 | 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm
The New School – 66 West 12th Street, Room 510

  • Presentations by iLAB 2010 Residents River to Creek and Stewardance
  • Presentation by Jennifer Monson, iLAND founder and Artistic Director
  • Panel Discussion with audience and special quest moderators to TBC

March 26, 2011 | 10:00 am to 5:00 pm
The New School – Location TBD

  • Morning workshops exploring movement and urban ecology at sites throughout NYC
  • Networking lunch provided by The New School Urban Forestry Club
  • Afternoon break-out discussions

Slow Networks will highlight the insights and discoveries of the 2010 iLAB residencies along with recent work by iLAND founder, Artistic Director, and award-winning choreographer Jennifer Monson. Workshop presenters and panelists will include personnel from:

Stewardance, a collaborative exploration of the relationship between street tree stewardship and mindful movement through the urban environment.

River to Creek, a participatory research project drawing attention to the geographic and ecological connections across the industrial landscape of North Brooklyn.

SIP (Sustained Immersive Process)/Watershed an investigation into the NYC Regional watershed viewed as a meta-choreography of the historical, geological, and cultural layers of the interaction of built and natural phenomena of water in the region.

The Symposium’s Friday evening session will include presentations from each of the participants with a general discussion panel following. The Saturday session will feature hands-on workshops out in the urban landscape, run by our three presenters, followed by a collaborative discussion period.

Update on the Remote and the Immediate

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We’ve been looking at practitioners of different disciplines to see how they treat time in their work. Choreographer Merce Cunningham used a stopwatch. He expected the dancers to perform each work in a specified duration without any sound cues or other external time-keeping devices. The novelist Jonathan Safran Foer manipulated the speed and direction of time in his story-telling. In Everything is Illuminated, he juxtaposed the forward-moving narrative of small town with the story of a backward-looking, history-seeking protagonist. Both narratives move along until they collide and collapse in one pivotal moment. Historians, according to Michel Foucault in The Archeology of Knowledge, are, in the modern age, interested in disruptions and interruptions in historical narratives, as opposed to their predecessors who posited totalizing theories of linear historical narratives. Former finance consultant Nassim Nicholas Talib, in The Black Swan, shows that history does not happen in the linear narratives which we often study in school. Instead, he says, “history jumps.” The unexpected alters history more than any other event. Thus, it is impossible to predict. John Malkovitch closes The Dancer Upstairs by juxtaposing a young girl’s dance (to Nina Simone’s “Who Knows Where the Time Goes”) with her father’s delayed reflection and rapid facial reaction to a long hardship. Some earth scientists and archeologists speak of eras and eons, time periods delineated by major historical or geological events but also somewhat arbitrarily defined.

These varied practices, theories and understanding of time show that narrative is often our way of framing and thus understanding time periods. Whether it is the sun passing over the sky or the growth of a sunflower, we need a story to help us sense the passing of time and the amount of time passed. Documentation helps us capture and/or tell the story.

If I want to understand a 25-year period of urban growth in New York City as well as the time it takes my lungs to fill and empty with air, perhaps I should document and juxtapose these two stories.

We’re working right now on capturing narratives through images. We’d like to put 2-4 of these narratives together in one flipbook. These flipbooks will be in both video and hard/paper format. The videos are easy to distribute and share with you; the hard copies allow you, the flipper, to determine the speed and direction of the action as you flip through the pages.

We’ll be posting a bunch of photos and links to videos on theremotetheimmediate.wordpress.com. Feel free to comment or offer your own ideas of narratives and juxtapositions.

One large questions looms.  How does one capture the experience of movement in images? We’re working on it . . .

River to Creek Walk: oyster shells, corn planting and your own personal marsh

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The walk through Greenpoint from the East River to Newtown Creek attracted a crowd of about 20 curious and intrepid citizen researchers.  We took people on a historical and tactile tour of the area, overlaying present, past and future with imaginative, factual and sensory data.

We were accompanied on the walk by Steve Glenn, of the Brooklyn Botanical Garden, who gave us a history of the flora that thrived in the area prior to settlement, and a sense of what had landed there now (everything from re-introduced scrub oaks to the ubiquitous Tree of Heaven, a non-native tree seen everywhere in New York City).

There’s a whole slew of photos of the walk (below are some highlights), and coming soon are some selected questions and observations garnered from our researchers during the walk.

River to Creek: come to the first open research trip

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Saturday, July 17, 2010, 5 PM
Meet at the India St. exit of the Greenpoint Ave. G stop.

Come to a research walk through the wilds of North Brooklyn, with an informal talk by Steve Glenn from the Brooklyn Botanical Garden and a historical tour of the land.  This event is FREE and open to the public.

Wear comfortable shoes, bring a hat and water!    RSVP and questions to tryst@culturepush.org.    Call 917-306-6363 if questions on the day of the walk.

River to Creek:  A Roving Natural History of North Brooklyn is a participatory research project and art action that draws attention to the geographic and ecological connections across the industrial landscape of North Brooklyn, from the wild empty lots at the end of Newtown Creek in Bushwick to the East River at the edge of Greenpoint.

There will be three public hands-on research tours–July 17, August 21 and Sept. 11–and a final presentation in the beginning of October.

PARK @ Fresh Kills

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PARK @ Fresh Kills

“PARK is about worlds we create and worlds that disappear.”

choreographyKATHY WESTWATER, poetryJENNIFER SCAPPETTONE, visual designSEUNG JAE LEE

performanceMAGGIE BENNETT, REBECCA BROOKS, REBECCA DAVIS, URSULA EAGLY, MELISSA GUERRERO, BELINDA HE, KAZU NAKAMURA, JEREMY PHEIFFER & ENRICO WEY [Read more…] about PARK @ Fresh Kills

Notes from the 2010 Symposium

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On March 26 and 27 a group of artists and scientists convened at The New School for iLAND’s second annual Symposium. The event opened with presentations from renowned public artist and key note speaker, Mary Miss, followed by iLAB residents – StrataSpore; StEM, Phil Silva and Timon McPhearson’s urban forest mapping project; and iLAND’s own Artistic Director Jennifer Monson.

Workshop at Solar One

Pod Casts – Download audio from the lectures:

MaryMiss
StEM
StrataSpore
Jennifer Monson

Day 2 of the iLAND Symposium began with workshops led by Jennifer Monson, StEM and StrataSpore; the following is an overview of the small group discussions that followed the workshops.  We invite you to help keep this dialogue moving forward by contributing your thoughts to the iLAND blog: [Read more…] about Notes from the 2010 Symposium

iLAND receives Gotham Green award

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iLAND receives a Gotham Green award for Green Community based Non-Profit!

Gotham GREEN is a sub-group of the Gotham City Network for people interested in the green business sector.  The Gotham Green awards recognizes organizations that are working in the forefront of the green movement.  iLAND was nominated for the award by Joel Chadabe, founder and director of the Eletronic Music Foundation and the Ear to the Earth festival.  A special thank you to Joel for your generous acknowledgement of iLAND’s work!

View the e-program from the awards luncheon.

The iLAND Symposium is coming up Friday, March 26 & 27

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Friday’s event includes a keynote speech by renowned public artist Mary Miss followed by brief presentations by iLAB residents – Strataspore, investigating the phenomenon of mushrooms in the city, StEM, Phil Silva and Timon McPhearson’s urban forest mapping project and Jennifer Monson, engaging watersheds and ground water through dance in the Mahomet Aquifer Project. On Saturday we will offer workshops on site in the city, lunch and small group discussion. [Read more…] about The iLAND Symposium is coming up Friday, March 26 & 27

Brooklyn Waterfront Greenway

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Rob Pirani, the Region Plan Association’s Director of Environmental Programs, presented at iLAND’s March symposium on plans for the Brooklyn Waterfront Greenway, which is a 14-mile bike and pedestrian path along Brooklyn’s waterfront that is being planned and conceived by the Brooklyn Greenway Initiative. [Read more…] about Brooklyn Waterfront Greenway

Opening Remarks from the Symposium

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photo by Bob Braine

Last month’s symposium had a great turnout and a variety of thought-provoking presentations. Over the next few weeks, the presentations will be posted online so that they can be shared with a much wider audience. For starters, here are the opening remarks from artistic director Jennifer Monson. An excerpt is below:

“Both art and science are fundamentally creative fields where there is a strong desire to investigate the unknown. Often the only way we can develop our understanding of something is by making a creative leap that dislodges our assumptions of it. This is part of the nature of experimentation and innovation – to put things together in an unexpected alchemy.”

Stay tuned for the next post – on NYC from a native plant’s perspective.